Summary

This data collection contains information gathered in 1975
on attorneys in Chicago, Illinois. The purpose of this data collection
was to describe and analyze the social organization of the legal
profession in Chicago. Several major aspects of the legal profession
were investigated: the organization of lawyers' work, the social
stratification within the Chicago Bar Association, prestige within the
profession, lawyers' personal values, career patterns and mobility,
networks of association, and the "elites" within the profession.
Specific questions elicited information on areas of law in which the
respondents spent most of their time practicing, and the ethnicities,
educational background, religion, political affiliation, bar
association memberships, and sex of respondents' friends and
colleagues. Other variables probe respondents' backgrounds, such as
father's occupation, home town, law school from which the respondent
graduated, religious and political affiliations, ethnicity, sex, and
income.

Geographic Coverage

Time Period(s)

1975

Date of Collection

1975-04 -- 1975-08

Data Collection Notes

(1) Variables 343 (Law School Attended), 349
(Religious Preference), 352 (Respondents Nationality), and 353
(Spouses Nationality) were recoded due to confidentiality concerns.
Values with counts less than 5 were collapsed into a "Recoded Other"
(100) value. (2) ICPSR has assigned missing value designations
according to the available documentation for this study. However, some
continuous variables have high and low values that may fall out of a
valid range. Users of the data should be aware of the possibility that
these values may not be valid.

Sample

A stratified probability sample with simple random
selection of elements within strata resulted in 1,024 attorneys.

Universe

A total of 13,823 attorneys in Chicago, Illinois, had law
offices, were not retired, had graduated from law school more than one
year previous to the study, and were listed in SULLIVAN'S LAW
DICTIONARY FOR THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, 1974-1975, and/or the
MARTINDALE-HUBBELL LAW DICTIONARY.

Data Type(s)

survey data

Mode of Data Collection

Original Release Date

1985-01-11

Version Date

2006-01-06

Version History

1985-01-11 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Standardized missing values.

2006-01-06 ICPSR created SAS, SPSS, and Stata setup
files, a SAS transport file, an SPSS portable file, and a Stata system
file containing variable locations, variable labels, and missing value
specifications. The data were transformed from card image to LRECL
format and the cases were ordered by sequence number. Variables 343
(Law School Attended), 349 (Religious Preference), 352 (Respondents
Nationality), and 353 (Spouses Nationality) were recoded due to
confidentiality concerns. Previously unreleased hardcopy documentation
has been scanned and included with the codebook.

Notes

The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

This study is provided by ICPSR. ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for a diverse and expanding social science research community.

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